I have completely revamped my pro-audio for Gentoo guide. It is now called Gentoo Studio, and is a complete, stand-alone guide for installing Gentoo from scratch for the purpose of creating a professional digital audio workstation.

Gentoo Studio is an unofficial, community-driven project. The name "Gentoo" is a trademark of the Gentoo Foundation, Inc.

Gentoo Studio now has a Mantis installation for reporting bugs and requesting features. Please visit https://bugs.gentoostudio.org. Feel free to sign up and report issues and add features you'd like to see. Please try to make sure that anything you report isn't a pure Gentoo issue - "bugs" should be along the lines of "you said x was installed but it isn't there," and features should be along the lines of "I want a better/different way to update my system than x." Please keep in mind that this is all just me and nobody else at the other end of the line, so responses may not be super-zippy.

Stuck by NeddySeagoon
I'm not sure that Unsupported Software might be better as this will not officially be supported by Gentoo, but leave it here for now _________________Gentoo Studio: A Gentoo-based, professional digital audio workstation OS.

Last edited by audiodef on Sun Dec 17, 2017 1:35 am; edited 8 times in total

Also coming soon: a stage4 installation (not with genkernel, though, as part of the purpose of all this is to avoid that and make the installation as resource-efficient as possible, working with your specific hardware)._________________Gentoo Studio: A Gentoo-based, professional digital audio workstation OS.

The stage4 installation tarball is complete and ready for public testing. Please go to http://audiodef.com/projects.php?project_id=1 and follow the instructions under Installation Method A: Stage4. Please post comments and feedback to this thread.

The stage4 installation is the most recommended way to set up Gentoo Studio, because I've already worked out a lot of kinks and gotten stuff working where installation might not have been so straightforward, including a regular user account with real-time priorities under which to run JACK and other audio programs.

It is my intention to update the tarball on a monthly basis, but as I have been accepted into graduate school, if I can figure out how to pay for it, things might get very busy for me. Regardless, this project is important to me and I will do the best I can to be responsive and helpful to anyone trying it out.

Have fun!_________________Gentoo Studio: A Gentoo-based, professional digital audio workstation OS.

Do you mean convert your existing Gentoo setup for pro-audio use (MIDI, recording/editing audio in real-time, etc.)? Yes, certainly. Just follow these sections in the DIY guide:

Configuring the kernel (copy the new kernel image to your boot partition after backing up the old one)
Configuring audio settings
Setting up a working environment (I assume you have xorg installed, so pick a lightweight DE or a WM you like)
Installing audio & MIDI programs
Testing your system

Just let me know if you have any questions. _________________Gentoo Studio: A Gentoo-based, professional digital audio workstation OS.

Thanks! Yes, eventually. Depending on how much interest this thing gets, I may split off a new domain for it and give it its own forums where users can contribute tricks, tips and how-to's specific to using Gentoo Studio. I'm just moving it ahead one step at a time._________________Gentoo Studio: A Gentoo-based, professional digital audio workstation OS.

One of my machines decided to go on holiday without leave, so I decided to back up my data and use it as a physical test machine for the stage4. What I noticed is that formatting seems to fail in the disk setup script, but if I manually perform the steps exactly as they are in the script, there is no problem.

If anyone can think of why, I would appreciate the advice. Seems puzzling to me._________________Gentoo Studio: A Gentoo-based, professional digital audio workstation OS.

I've taken down the stage4 tarball from my server because it's a small hosted virtual machine and I'm getting low on space.

This does NOT mean Gentoo Studio is in any danger of going away!

Until I configure a server with a larger disk at home to host the tarball, please PM me if you want it and I'll get it to you directly._________________Gentoo Studio: A Gentoo-based, professional digital audio workstation OS.

Qjackctl (0.3.8, 0.3.9 and 9999) require qt-xmlpatterns, or it will fail with the error described here. These are the modified ebuilds. Drop them into your local overlay to use. I have only tested compilation of 0.3.8, so please let me know if 0.3.9 or 9999 still fail with the above-mentioned error.

Did some thread cleanup. Still have a little more to do, but ebuilds will not be posted directly to this thread any more. They will be posted here and announcements about ebuild fixes will be posted here. This thread will stick with general configuration issues for Gentoo Studio, as well as general tips and tricks for audio on Gentoo._________________Gentoo Studio: A Gentoo-based, professional digital audio workstation OS.

I was working on issues surrounding installing Openoctave from an ebuild when I came across this statement in the source README:

Code:

For Gentoo users: When building your kernel, Gentoo recommends you build alsa directly into the kernel.
In our testing, this has proved more stable than building alsa as modules.

That might be true, but I recommend that ALSA be compiled as modules anyway. If you need to troubleshoot sound issues, you'll have to reboot if you change certain things (driver conflicts, for example). If ALSA is compiled as modules, you can unload and reload them without having to reboot. I've never personally experienced stability issues with ALSA as modules and in fact whenever I've had "issues", sometimes I've found that having modules (oddly) solved them.

Do what works for you - I'm just saying modules might be easier to work with._________________Gentoo Studio: A Gentoo-based, professional digital audio workstation OS.

It seems the hot-pluggable CPU kernel option might be a good thing for multi-core systems built to perform serious audio tasks. If anyone has detailed knowledge about why this may or may not be a good thing for Gentoo Studio, please post here._________________Gentoo Studio: A Gentoo-based, professional digital audio workstation OS.

For those who set up their Gentoo machines to perform professional audio work AND want Openshot, which seems to have been removed from the pro-audio overlay, you can find the latest version in the luman overlay, as indicated here._________________Gentoo Studio: A Gentoo-based, professional digital audio workstation OS.